I haven’t really noticed any picture differences, but I’ve never done an A/B comparison and I don’t have an HDTV (yet) to get the ‘pure’ picture, etc. I’m using S-Video now for my feed, when I get my HDTV I’ll go component.

1> Picture quality. As noted not only here but IN the freaking lawsuit, is not an issue.

2> Do not record as much programming as advertised. Well, ok, he has a point here. Of course, they record MORE than advertised, but he doesn’t want THAT little factoid to leak out, does he? My 60 hour box can record over 63 hours. Not sure about the 80 hour, I upgraded it, and there is no advertisement for a 500 hour TiVo. But with two 250 gig drives in there, they could advertise 550 hours and it would still be below the actual number.

3> Takes longer to record to a DVD than advertised. Hmmm…this seems a little hard to quantify. The lawsuit doesn’t display any numbers that I can see. How’s he going to prove this?

It goes on to say that the ambulance chasers he hired believe these claims have merit. Ummm…yeah, right. First of all, I doubt you understand the claims. Secondly, you ‘believe’ pretty much anything you’re told to believe for $425,000.

Seems an awful lot of trouble to go to to get a 10% discount on Pioneer products. Just shop around, could get a better deal than that by shopping smart (no, not at S-Mart).

I would REALLY love to see 5% opt out and this ‘tard get stuck with the bill.

I had seen some posts on the TiVo community from people who had both Pioneer and Humax units complaining about the Humax build quality compared to the Pioneer. Now that you mention it, I don’t think the complaints included the Toshiba units.

Have you noticed any difference in the picture quality between the Pioneer and the Toshiba? I’ve see complaints about crushed blacks on the Toshiba and Humax units.

That said, I’m not sure why this is worthy of a lawsuit …

My “209-hour” tivo actually gets something less than that but I’m not sure what its capacity is when set to “medium”.

I actually have a Toshiba TX-20 sitting here along with my 810H and I don’t think the build quality is poor. It actually has features the Pioneer lacks, being a newer generation – I like the front panel jacks, and the FireWire input is a nice feature. The display on the Pioneer is still better – but they run basically the same software so that’s a wash.

I bought my Pioneer 810 after the software upgrades for picture quality were developed, so I can’t comment on how bad the quality was before the upgrade. But after the upgrade I find the picture quality to superior to the regular TiVo Series 2 I have, and this is on a 58″ HDTV. Maybe they are comparing the quality to other (non-TiVo based) DVD burners.

As far as the amount of hours the Pioneer TiVo records, I agree that their marketing speak is a little misleading. It has always annoyed me that TiVo call it “an 80 hour TiVo”, when it is actually a 23 to 80 hour model. And the Pioneer 810 is a 13 to 80 hour model. Is this enough to warrant a class action lawsuit? Not in my mind.

A full DVD is recorded in about 20 minutes. How is that a problem?

If Pioneer hadn’t already thrown in the towel with TiVo based products, this would certainly cause them to consider dropping the line. To me this is the biggest lose here – the Pioneer 810 I have has a much better build quality than the regular Series 2 I have, and I’ve heard the Humax and Toshiba models are even worse than the TiVo branded models. TiVo may have lost Pioneer as a manufacturer forever.